“My wardrobe’s going to be twice the size by the end of this year,” I remarked breezily, but some part of me wanted to remind both him and me that this had an expiration date, no matter how endless it seemed right now.
“That’s the plan,” he replied with a glance at me. I relaxed and found myself enjoying our date. We didn’t talk about anything in particular and certainly nothing regarding the future of our relationship or what would happen at the end of the year. I was just a woman, out with a man who seemed determined to charm the panties off her every chance he got. He let his knees nudge up against mine beneath the table, and I bit my lip and wondered if he knew the kind of effect he was having on me.
“Mmm, that was so good.” I pushed myself back from the table and let out a long sigh, downing the last of my water and fighting the urge to wipe my finger around the edge of the plate to get up the last of the sauce from my salmon.
“It really was,” he agreed. “Let me get the bill, and I’ll drive us home.”
“I have my car.”
“Yeah, and I’ll get my driver to come and pick it up later.” He waved his hand. “I want to take you home myself.”
I bit my lip and eyed him across the table. I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to hook up with him again so soon, just to make sure the physical didn’t tip over into the emotional, that the lines didn’t blur any more than they already had. But when he treated me with such charm, such sweetness and kindness, it was hard to keep that in mind. I just wanted to go home, pour a glass of wine, and spend the rest of the evening in bed with him.
“We should do this more often,” I remarked as I grabbed my coat after he’d paid up. God, I was going to miss evenings like this, having someone to spend the night with, someone who would treat me like a lady in all the best ways.
“What do you mean?” he asked, as I slipped my arm through his and we headed for the door.
“Oh, nothing.” I waved my hand, but he suddenly seemed prickly as though I’d said something that had bothered him.
“No, do you think we don’t come out enough?” he asked as I reached his car. He pulled the door open for me and waved me inside, and I glanced up at him and felt as though I had walked into an open bear trap that I hadn’t seen till the last minute.
“No, it’s not that,” I promised him. “I just meant I like going out with you. We’re both so busy, we don’t get to do it as much as I’d like.”
“We’ll do it more often,” he replied at once. He had gone a little darker, a color of red I had never seen from him before.
“I really wasn’t trying to drop hints,” I told him.
“Yeah, but you’re right,” he shot back, cutting me off. “I should take you out more. You’re my wife, after all.”
And with that, he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street, and I glanced over my shoulder at my car and wondered if I should have taken that instead. I wouldn’t have blundered straight into this conversation if I had done that, and I felt as though I had managed to fuck up what had been a perfectly lovely evening so far. I leaned and looked out of the window, deciding that the best course of action for me was to keep my damn mouth shut for the foreseeable future and hope I didn’t blunder into another silly statement that I knew I wouldn’t be able to take back. Kristo wasn’t the kind of guy to let things go easily. I had known that as soon as he had turned up on my doorstep when I’d left the first time. I had a feeling that any little comment I made, no matter how innocuous it might have sounded to me, could read as something that would indicate my dissatisfaction to him. And he would do everything he could to keep me around, even if he would never have admitted it to himself or to me.